


Behind the Curtain

by DollyPop



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Canon - Manga, F/M, Healing, Injury, Injury Recovery, Manga Spoilers, Missing Scene, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 20:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5261870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DollyPop/pseuds/DollyPop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After fighting Noah, they're all lucky to be alive.</p>
<p>Stein and Sid and a moment of thanks for Marie's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Behind the Curtain

“Thank you.”

It was the only sound in the room, save for the occasional whistling in the corner caused by the the mass he knew was Marie inhaling painfully, huddled on the bed. Sid’s head came up from staring at the new stitches along his forearm, a different ulna, elbow, wrist attached to him after his own arm was chewed off by one of Noah’s monsters.

Sid stared at Stein’s face, but the man was busy rechecking the stitches on Sid’s blue arm, looking to see if the muscle fibers were connected properly.

Once again.

Avoiding his gaze.

Acting like he said nothing. 

Sid knew why. He didn’t need to ask what Stein was thanking him for: he knew. Everyone knew. Marie would be dead, swallowed whole by that creature if Sid didn’t sacrifice an arm and become that much closer to becoming Doctor Franken Stein’s monster, a man made of parts.

As the moment stretched uncomfortably thin, Sid wanted to ask if Marie was still out cold, if just to throw sound into the room, but of course she was. He could hear her breathing, could hear that there was a sudden, slight rasp when she exhaled. Stein’s face went dark for a moment, glasses catching a glare before the expression disappeared, immediately after the rasp settled, and Stein looked over Sid’s IV line. 

The truth was that Sid didn’t know how to answer. He thinks maybe he just shouldn’t, because he’s bone tired, and every time he looked at Nygus, who stepped out to get more painkiller, he wanted to rip Justin to shreds, and Stein’s entire back was practically a mass of ruptured skin and torn open stitches, his lab-coat discarded somewhere in the corner, still bloodstained. But even that, the fact that he’d cradled Marie’s body to his chest, took the hit for her, Marie must have looked like mince-meat, a woman wearing a skin of mottled bruises.

They didn’t come out of that battle in good light. Thank Death for the Spartoi. Sid never thought he’d get to the point where he was saved by his students, let alone Black*Star: Death, he remembered him as the infant he’d held when he was just twelve years old on a mission with Naigus. That decision saved his life, fighting for the last Star Clan member. 

Well. It saved his unlife, at least. 

Saved all of them, if he was to be honest. Nygus. . .she came out of it not too bad, at least, she’d had worse and bounced back from it quick enough in the past. A split lip, a heinous concussion, a terrible blow to the temple: she’d stared harsher in the eye. But she’d been unconscious by the time he could sling her over his shoulder for a retreat. How could he ever have hoped to fight and win when his weapon, his partner, when _Mira_ couldn’t fight? He needed to remember to thank those kids, one of those days, preferably before the world went even further to hell.

There was plenty to be grateful for, sitting in that room. Sid had a new arm, one that would function, so he didn’t truly lose anything. And all of them came out not too bad, considering bad would be dead. Bad was always to be dead, and despite knowing the danger, being trained almost every day for more than a decade for the possibility of losing their lives, he found that, at the suddenly even more real, inevitable possibility, they all clung so tightly to living.

They had everything to lose. He knew he did. He’d died once, before: he couldn’t remember much of it, but he knew that when he woke up, he was happy to see day, so death must have been unwelcome. And he had missions he still wanted to complete, jobs to sort out, people to see from day to day. Mira. . .she’d been awfully strung tight when he came back from the dead, some strange mixture of mourning and relief, as though unknowing where to step.

Yeah. There was a lot to lose. For all of them, not just him. Marie had a future she wanted, Mira did, too, though it was on a different path.

Stein loved to act like he didn’t, the stoic scientist façade was one he’d perfected over the years. To others. Spirit always mentioned how easy Stein was to read, and it was never more true than earlier. Sid thinks he never saw Stein run so fast in his entire life to shield Marie, turning on a dime to eclipse her body from the blow and splitting the skin of his back open enough so that the blood seeped past the coarse material of his shirt and labcoat. Last time Sid checked, altruism wasn’t high on Stein’s list of character traits. He almost wants to snort: how transparent can those two, can Stein be and still think he’s being covert?

He remembered back to just a few hours prior, when Stein first put the curtain up when so he could check over Marie’s injuries with some privacy, but Sid and Nygus were still in the room, and there wasn’t much to be hidden by some flimsy scrap of cloth. They could both could see their silhouettes, though Nygus would never admit she was peeping in on what they could only assume was a delicate moment.

They could both see the way Stein took extra time to look over Marie; the way his shoulders slumped, his fists clenched and shoulders rigid. Mira’d looked over at him while she prepped Sid for his new arm attachment, but he only shook his head. He knew she was concerned over Marie, always was. After they cleared Stein’s name, no one was surprised, no one who gathered in that graveyard, at least.

After they came back with something different in their eyes when they looked at each other, that was the surprise. And Nygus was concerned, had always been concerned, even when they were younger. Marie didn’t often need protecting, not when she was a Pulverizer, but she’d gotten herself a group of concerned figures.

Most of which protested her poor choices in men.

But things had changed. Things always change, would always change. Mira sighed silently after he looked at her, blinking and going back to her job of prepping him, sparing quick glances up at the curtain. They were assassins: they observed, they saw all, they knew when to strike.

It wasn’t then. 

The entire world was teetering on a war and it was the worst possible time for anyone to find one another, let alone people as stubborn and strange as Stein, as loving as Marie. Why pressure them? Why push?

So, hours after that, in that same hospital room, after Stein gave his muttered thanks, Sid says nothing. He says nothing because he knows Stein, knew him since they were both just bratty little tweens, undisciplined and soft and that “Thank you”s and “I’m sorry”s are foreign to the Doctor.

Or, were.

Sid nods and Stein’s replying nod is just a single jerk, up, down, finished. When Mira walks in, having left to get more morphine, Sid watched the barest twitch of her eyebrows, indicating her confusion, when Stein immediately left Sid’s side and snatched a vial out of her hands to walk back around the curtain where they both knew he really felt he should have been. Mira stares for a second before she walks to Sid’s bedside, rechecks what Stein had already looked over, making sure everything was to her liking.

It doesn’t take long, so she plops down in the chair she’d dragged beside him, earlier, and they both watch the only movement in the room, silent as a headstone.

The two of them watch a shadow, Stein’s, drip painkiller into an IV bag. They watch the shaking. They watch a hand come to what must be a face, bloody and beaten. They watch that touch linger, the silhouette hunching down.

Mira’s palm finds his new one: an action so commonplace with them, yet new with the fresh, foreign flesh.

And they don’t say a word.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hella late, but written for Soul Eater Angst Week: Things Left Unsaid!


End file.
